Israeli Kibbutz

by Editor
February 11, 2016 at 9:47 am

http://www.smartertimes.com/1469/israeli-kibbutz

A Times article about the socialist senator from Vermont who is running for president as a Democrat, Bernie Sanders, reports that he "even spent time on an Israeli kibbutz in the 1960s." As William Safire points out on Twitter, the formulation "Israeli kibbutz" is a redundancy. Call the Squad Squad, as Mr. Safire might say.

Some might argue that the word "Israeli" helps people who don't know what a kibbutz is. But my view is that those people can look it up in a dictionary, and that the paper needn't be edited for the most ignorant readers. If the Times editors really think a definition is necessary, a more elegant way to do it would be with a parenthetical phrase — "a kibbutz, an Israeli collective farm, in the 1960s" — rather than the inartful way the paper wound up doing it.